Tariq Ali Quotes

That natural disasters are required to provide Americans with a glimpse of reality in their own country is an indication of the deep rot infecting the official political culture.

Tayyip Erdogan wants to go beyond George W. Bush by making critical journalism and critics in the academy illegal. What will be the difference between him and a military government? Very little. I read his remarks on the effectiveness of Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany. Well, yes. But then the AKP would have to ban all other political parties, close down all critical newspapers, burn the books critical of the regime and gas the Kurds to death...the final solution of the Kurdish 'problem.' Somehow I don't think he is about to do that.

What we are seeing in Turkey is a non-uniformed authoritarian regime led by a politician, Tayyip Erdogan, who has allowed power to go to his head and is behaving more and more like a despot. Sooner or later this will provoke political uprisings throughout the country as happened after Gezi.

I think the big tragedy of the Cuban Revolution was that it became dependent on the Soviet Union, and it became dependent on the Soviet Union under a very reactionary bureaucratic regime led by Leonid Brezhnev.

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

If you go to former Yugoslav states, the Balkan states, Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, Slovenia, the situation is dire. Not to mention Bosnia, which is just run like a colony. The way they used to stand up and sing hymns to President Tito, they now salute the EU flag. It's a very strange transition that we're witnessing in most of Europe, and I don't think it's going to work.

The main implication is a remapping of the world in line with American policy and American interests. Natural resources are limited, and the United States wants to make sure that its own population is kept supplied. The principle effect of this will be for the United States to control large parts of the oil which the world possesses.

All these wars are similar in the way ideology is being used. It's the ideology of so-called humanitarian intervention. We don't want to do this, but we're doing this for the sake of the people who live there. This is, of course, a terrible sleight of hand because all sorts of people live there, and, by and large, they do it to help one faction and not the other.

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.

During the Gulf War, journalists used to challenge government news managers and insisted they wouldn't just accept the official version of events.

The situation in Turkey is extremely troubling. A panic-stricken regime, desperate to divide the Kurdish population from non-Kurds because it feared the rise of the HDP, has helped to create a huge crisis in the country. Can it be ended while Tayyip Erdogan remains in power? I don't think so. Erdogan may not be a "joker," but he is definitely a political plagiarist.

The current Eurozone is obviously dysfunctional. And serious people within Germany and elsewhere know this to be the case and know things cannot function this way forever.

The "coalition against terrorism" means the United States. It does not wish anyone else to interfere with its strategy.

There are huge political problems in Germany, but German economic power is something which was bound to happen. The way out of this situation is through the further democratization of the European Union and a changing of its structures.

The past has too much knowledge embedded in it, and therefore it's best to forget it and start anew.

I do think the Cubans have to change some of the political structures there and allow critical voices, for their own sakes, because unless there is accountability the revolution will totally atrophy.

I've called David Cameron worse things than joker....and a former Prime Minister Tony Blair is widely referred to as a war criminal.

I think to compare Germany to the Third Reich is utterly ludicrous.

To fight tyranny and oppression by using tyrannical and oppressive means, to combat a single-minded and ruthless fanaticism by becoming equally fanatical and ruthless, will not further the cause of justice or bring about a meaningful democracy. It can only prolong the cycle of violence.

The real problem is the total capitulation of German social democracy to capitalism, reflected and symbolized by actual extreme center coalition governments in Germany, which have been in power for a long time and still are even as we speak. That is the real problem: that there is no serious opposition in Germany at all. And the Left party is divided.

The war in Afghanistan, the first war of the twenty-first century, shows the United States doing what it wants to do, not caring about who it antagonizes, not caring about the effects on neighboring regions.

If there is a Greek exit from the Eurozone, I think the German elite will be quite pleased that they can then use that to restructure the Eurozone and make it a zone where only strong countries are allowed in. There would then be two tiers within the European Union, which is in fact already happening. But you cannot simply get rid of German control by raising the specter of the Third Reich. That's ahistorical.

We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.

The implication strongly is that Osama bin Laden is a Hitler, even though he has no state power at all. It's just grotesque if you seriously think about it.

The function of a bourgeois democracy is to secure the consent of the masses to their own exploitation and oppression.

If every single Jew born anywhere in the world has the right to become an Israeli citizen, then all the Palestinians who were chucked out of Palestine by the Zionist Government should have the same right, very simple.

The West and its media have barely covered the recent wave of repression in Turkey. The reason is simple. They are paying billions to Ankara to control and take back the refugees of the Syrian war. They are fearful that if they offend Tayyip Erdogan he will use the refugees as a political weapon. So they keep quiet.

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."

If you see what passes as the news on the networks in the United States, there's virtually no coverage of the rest of the world, not even of neighboring countries like Mexico or neighboring continents like Latin America.

At the moment we have a critical situation in Greece. Even as we speak, where there is an open attempt by the EU to destroy Syriza by splitting it. There is a German obstinacy and utter refusal to seriously consider an alternative. The reason isn't even a lack of money, because money swims around the EU coffers endlessly, and they could write off the debt tomorrow if they wanted. But they don't want to do so, because of the election of a left-wing government. They want to punish Syriza in public, to humiliate it so that this model doesn't go any further than Greece.

When a country is invaded and attacked and people resist it's important to speak up and to say they have the right to resist and to defend their right to resist.

Basically, we are witnessing the twilight of democracy.

Gamal Abdal Nasser, the nationalist leader of Egypt, was described by British Prime Minister Anthony Eden as an Egyptian Hitler. Then it carried on like that. Saddam Hussein became Hitler when he was no longer a friend of the West. Then Milosevic became Hitler.

The whole history of the 20th century is a history of resistance groups which are either nationalist or, in large parts of the Muslim word, religious groups.

The European Union is effectively a union dominated by the German political and economic elite. Its main function is to serve as a nucleus for financial capitalism and to ease the road for that capitalism. The other functions just irritate everyone: it's undemocratic; decisions are not made by parliament; the European Parliament is not sovereign.

The European Union has lost virtually all of its credibility amongst large swaths of the European population.

There are different versions of Islam... it is meaningless to claim to speak in the name of a ‘real’ Islam.

Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global. The events of 11 September 2001 are not exception.

The United States is now The Empire. There isn't an empire; there's The Empire, and that empire is the United States.

Tony Blair is a war criminal.

It's a total failure of the Western imagination that the only enemy they can see is Adolph Hitler.

People are increasingly beginning to feel that democracy itself is being destroyed by this latest phase of globalization and that politics doesn't matter because it changes nothing.

After flirting with neoisolationism, the U.S. is now deciding it wants to run the world.

I think the United States and its British attack dog are not taken seriously anywhere in the world and can play no role in helping a political solution.

Desperation is the result of globalization.

I think another crisis, which is being predicted now and which will be worse than what we saw in 2008, could bring the European Union down unless there are huge reforms from within to democratize, to give more power to the regions, etc. If this doesn't happen, the European Union will fall.

The extreme center is the political expression of the neoliberal state.

As for ISIS, we know where they come from. We know who has used them in the past. We know their sectarianism leads to killings. Here the Turkish state, like its NATO bosses, has helped to create a monster that it now claims to oppose.